Procol Harum

Beyond
the Pale

Matthew Fisher on
'AWSoP'

From a BBC Radio
Merseyside Interview, 1992

InterviewerWhat was the session for Whiter
Shade of Pale like, and how did you come by the intro [sic].
I mean, it's based on a classical piece, isn't it?

Matthew Fisher
It's based on lots of things or at least two different Bach
pieces, plus there's an awful lot of it that isn't really based
on anything, it's just me. It's a bit of a hodge-podge.

Whenever you read, look in
books it says the introduction [sic] was based on
Bach.

Yeah, just 'cos someone writes something in a book don't make
it true, you know. It wasn't a kind of a note-for-note crib which
I think a lot of people, you know, that read these things like
this in books and probably wouldn't know Bach from the back end
of a bus run away with the idea that I – you know that we
just took some Bach tune and sort of said well that will do,
let's use that. And it wasn't that at all, it was just like a
coupla notes here and a coupla notes there and the rest of it was
me.

What are the pieces of Bach
that inspired that? I mean I'm pressing you on this because it's
about the most famous introduction [sic] in Rock music
and so people are fascinated to know how that came about.

Right. Well – the long note, the long held note at the
beginning with the descending bass line, I suppose is like Air
on a G String, you know, like that's used in the 'Hamlet'
adverts, and the ... um ... the sort of [sings] 'da – dada
– diddle – ah' bit is rather like a choral prelude,
well some people call it Sleepers Awake, I think, that's
the English. It's very, very similar but not exactly because the
bass line is different. You see, the tune had to be changed a bit
to accommodate the actual bass part that was going on. So those
are the two things anyway.